THE LAND ETHIC 
ity, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it 
tends otherwise. 
It of course goes without saying that economic feasibility 
limits the tether of what can or cannot be done for land. It 
always has and it always will. The fallacy the economic de- 
terminists have tied around our collective neck, and which 
we now need to cast off, is the belief that economics deter- 
mines all land-use. This is simply not true. An innumerable 
host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of 
all land relations, is determined by the land-users' tastes and 
predilections, rather than by his purse. The bulk of all land 
relations hinges on investments of time, forethought, skill, 
and faith rather than on investments of cash. As a land-user 
thinketh, so is he. 
I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product 
of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic 
is ever 'written.' Only the most superficial student of history 
supposes that Moses 'wrote' the Decalogue; it evolved in 
the minds of a thinking community, and Moses wrote a 
tentative summary of it for a 'seminar.' I say tentative be- 
cause evolution never stops. 
The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as 
emotional process. Conservation is paved with good inten- 
tions which prove to be futile, or even dangerous, because 
they are devoid of critical understanding either of the land, 
or of economic land-use. I think it is a truism that as the 
ethical frontier advances from the individual to the com- 
munity, its intellectual content increases. 
The mechanism of operation is the same for any ethic: 
social approbation for right actions: social disapproval for 
wrong actions. 
By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and 
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